Sunday, July 29, 2012

Robert McCrumb chooses the ten best closing lines in literature for The Guardian:

Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë
"I lingered round them, under that benign sky; watched the moths fluttering among the heath, and hare-bells; listened to the soft wind breathing through the grass; and wondered how any one could ever imagine unquiet slumbers for the sleepers in that quiet earth."
Brontë's masterpiece is often cited for its gothic morbidity and intoxicating romantic darkness, but here – stepping back from the tragedy of Heathcliff and Catherine – the novel displays an acute evocation of Yorkshire combined with memorable poetic grandeur. This note of redemption promises a better future in the union of Cathy and Hareton.

BOOKS: Were you always a big reader?
LARKIN: It’s something I’ve grown to love because when traveling it becomes your companion.(...) Years ago when my manager and I drove to the Midwest we played “Jane Eyre” on CD. I had to stop in Ann Arbor for a bookstore showcase. We could barely finish the show fast enough to get back in the car and back to Jane. (Amy Sutherland)

Rachel, whose mother Myra was an English teacher, says she has been writing since she was a teenager. ‘I went through a stage of writing my cramped hand in tiny books,’ she says. ‘My two sisters and I did have our Brontë period. My mum is from Yorkshire and we would go up to the Moors. It tapped into our romantic visions of ourselves.’

The List talks with the Shirley Conran, author of the erotic classic Lace, talks about this put-sex-into-books mania:

Although their body fluids are absent from the texts, she reckons Messrs Darcy and Rochester are pretty hard to beat. ‘Erotica is intended to fire you up, which is not what Ms Austen and Ms Brontë may have intended but they did it, because they wrote passionately. I suppose because the alternative at the time was knitting or embroidery.’

Before you write off zines as non-commercial, consider this: Charlotte Brontë's zine, a miniature manuscript, written when she was 14, sold at auction last year for $1.5 million. It's also regarded as important in shedding light on Brontë's literary development. (Danielle Wright)

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Weekly Quote

Villette is one blaze, one broad illumination; the whole world seems abroad; moonlight and heaven are banished: the town, by her own flambeaux, beholds her own splendour—gay dresses, grand equipages, fine horses and gallant riders throng the bright streets. I see even scores of masks. It is a strange scene, stranger than dreams.
~ Villette (ch. XXXVIII) by Charlotte Brontë